On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 05:14:46AM -0400, IvorW wrote:
... Suppose we have a contributor called Victoria, working on the guide. Does she have to share her home node with the description of the place of the same name? ... I think we need a metadata field called node type.
Personally speaking, I'm wary of adding complexity of this kind, and I think node names should be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. In exceptional cases, such as your example, the user might have to yield their name. I think accurate naming will generally stave off name conflicts, and we won't have to take the Wikipedia approach of "disambiguation" (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria ).
I think the existing category system does this already.
Note: a place has a pinpoint location, whereas a locale has an area.
There are lots of meanings for "place", unfortunately. A certain stretch of pavement, a restaurant, a tunnel under the river. I'd hesitate to try and define it too narrowly in terms of a pinpoint location. (A shop might have one - but what about a sprawling market?)
If we put this in place, we could have different templates for each node type. Also, we could distinguish between Victoria(Place) and Victoria(Person).
In theory, different templates for different things could be cool. I think the category system as it stands could be used to accomplish that, though, rather than adding another layer to the system.